The violence of Lope de Aguirre in the chronicles of the discovery and its re-reading in the Latin American historical novel – El Dorado

Sumario: During the time of the great navigations and the Spanish colonization in America, the indigenous myth of the El Dorado stimulated the gold rush, to which many expeditions were blindly organized through the Amazon forest. Among them, there is the journey led by Pedro de Ursúa (1559-1561). Some of the events related to this expedition and its rereading throughout fiction are the objective of this paper because one of the most violent and perplexing historiographic characters from the Spanish colonization, Lope de Aguirre, emerges from it. For this purpose, we are going to use as analytical corpus the chronicle El Dorado, by Francisco Vázquez ([1562] 2007), and the historical novel Una lanza por Lope de Aguirre, by Funes (1984). Due to the specific characteristics of the novel, discussions about historiographic metafiction will be performed as one of the modalities of this genre as well. This research relies on Hutcheon (1985) and Fleck (2017) for theoretical background.